Today, the pace of life is ever increasing and obtaining information whenever and wherever possible has become part of people's daily life. When a user reads a newspaper, a magazine, a poster, or a bulletin board on the road, and finds an article of interest, there is usually a need to take down the information provided by the article. This can be done by writing down the information in the article. However, it is time-consuming to write down the information and, given the circumstances, most people would find it impossible to write down more than a few words, let alone a paragraph or an entire article.
One way to solve the problem is to take a picture of the article using a mobile terminal, e.g., a mobile phone. In some circumstances, taking a picture of what a user sees on the road is the only way to save the information for future reference. For example, when an article or a poster contains any picture, the only practical way to copy the picture on the go is to take a picture of it using a mobile terminal. Many mobile phones nowadays are equipped with integrated digital cameras, which can be used to snap quick shots. Pictures taken in this way are usually stored as image files, such as files with extensions .jpg, .bmp., .png, and .tif., initially in the mobile terminal's internal memory or hard drive, or in an external memory or hard drive connected to the mobile terminal, e.g., a compact flash (“CF”) card, a secure digital (“SD”) card, a mini SD card, or a micro SD card. A user can then connect the mobile terminal to a personal computer (“PC”), which usually has a larger memory, larger hard drive, more processing power, and a larger display, and transfer the image files stored in the mobile terminal or the external memory or hard drive connected thereto to the PC. Alternatively, the user can disconnect any medium connected to the mobile terminal and used to store the relevant image files and reconnect it to a PC, thereby transferring the image files stored in the medium to the PC.
Once a picture file is transferred to a PC, a user can further process it using the PC. For example, any text in the picture file may be converted to text in a different file format using a software application with optical character recognition (“OCR”) function. The image file itself or the text extracted by the OCR software can be further posted online by the user using the PC. The time lapse from the time a picture is taken using the mobile terminal to the time the corresponding image file is further processed by the user using a PC can be very long. Most users do not regularly transfer files from their mobile terminals to PCs, and even if they do, they usually do not immediately process the files on the PC once transferred. This is counterproductive because often times the very reason that a user wants to take the information down on the road is to be able to add his/her thoughts to it and quickly share the information and the thoughts with friends or other contacts. There is a need for instant image file processing and OCR on the go so that a user does not lose her thoughts and does not have to wait until she can have access to a PC connected to the Internet.
There are primitive OCR products for mobile terminals. They can provide basic OCR functionalities which do not go beyond business card recognition. For example, they can allow a user to take a picture of a business card, perform OCR on the image file showing the business card, and allow the user to save relevant recognized information in relevant fields in the mobile terminal's address book. Even though these products allow limited editing of the recognized information, e.g., to correct OCR mistakes, they do not allow users to edit the captured information extensively, and they do not support advanced editing options such as text-image mixed editing and compilation. Often limited by the mobile terminal's processing power, a user will still need to transfer the image files to a PC to do subsequent editing and processing. There is a need for mobile terminals to provide on-the-go image capture, OCR, editing, and sharing functionalities to enrich users' experience.